


in my lonely body

by TolkienGirl



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: (so no spoilers pls), Amputation, Angst, Book 2: The Queen of Attolia (Queen's Thief), F/M, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Series Reread before Return of the Thief, Unrequited Love, title from Mary Oliver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26877334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Sometimes his chest ached fiercely with the knowledge of it—the certainty that the blunt nails and the creases of his knuckles and the riverbed veins down the back were all real and sore and comfortable.
Relationships: Attolia | Irene/Eugenides, Eddis | Helen & Eugenides
Kudos: 36





	in my lonely body

Galen had said he wouldn’t die young and wouldn’t go blind. Galen probably didn’t think he was lying, or if he did, he had a physician’s calculus of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, that thrived in the company of invalids too weary to challenge it.

Eugenides had hurt his eyes before. They had weakened in Sounis’ prison, and regained their strength. They had been irritated by dust, grime, dirty water, crushed obsidian, and blows to the head.

He had always dragged his body to the cliff’s edge, then dragged it back again.

Scarred and aching, rash yet healing, it always came with him.

 _She_ had put an end to that.

Strange, still, to think that he only had one hand. He didn’t _like_ to think of it. He tried not to talk of it, to Galen or Eddis or his father, the only people who persisted in coming to visit him. When his sisters had come, at first, they cried. They hadn’t cried when they were young and he hated to see them do it now. He hated to be like a graveside, a massacre, all in an uncomfortably large nightshirt.

All on account of his hand. The lack of one, really. Sometimes his chest ached fiercely with the knowledge of it—the certainty that the blunt nails and the creases of his knuckles and the riverbed veins down the back were all real and sore and comfortable.

But it wasn’t there. It never would be.

He reconsidered the benefits of being blind. Unfortunately, there was only one. Not seeing. And that would have been just as well accomplished by being dead.

_Her_ hands had touched him. More then once. She’d fitted one under his jaw. Then, just then—before, at the end—she had cupped his face in them.

It was enough to drive what was left of him mad. He spent a black hour of a typically immeasurable night recalling that moment, nearer than a dream.

He could have gnashed the white meat of her palm with his teeth, like the animal she believed him to be. He could have pressed a kiss to the curve between her thumb and forefinger, like the lovesick boy she would have scorned more than the animal.

He thought of these choices now, when the blade and time beyond it had made everything but the horror distant, remote. Like an island hidden in a storm-bent sea, his freedom—

And his heart.

For Eddis he had gone to Sounis’ dungeon. Had gone to the heart of the Mountain. Had died a number of deaths, none of them his own. For Eddis he had let Attolia devour him.

He never blamed Eddis. Or to be more exact, he never blamed Helen, who was the country herself, more than the crown could ever be.

It was not because of her that Eugenides wanted to die. It was not even despair, exactly.

He simply did not want to learn what he would do for Attolia.


End file.
